Kim Gordon: Queen of the Underground

If the tabloids covered noise-rock legends, this former Sonic Youth member's rocky breakup from ex-bandmate Thurston Moore would've made headlines. Since they don't, pick up her smart, rambunctious memoir, Girl in a Band, which tackles the split head-on and helps you understand the duo at the heart of what was one of indie rock's longest-running, most beloved band

Early in her new memoir, Kim Gordon refers to her ex-bandmate in Sonic Youth, drummer Steve Shelley, as sitting at his kit like "a dad behind a desk." Girl in a Band pretty much lets it rip. Though she skims through most of Sonic Youth’s meaty history like she’s bored with it already, the richest parts are the downtime and the off moments, like her sexual awakening as a teenager in Hawaii and her first make-out sesh post-divorce from another ex-bandmate, Thurston Moore. Gordon’s had what she calls an "unconventional" life, and though much of that happened with a bass guitar strapped to her chest, a whole lot more of it didn’t. On a snowy evening before her shoot for GQ, Gordon illuminated how and why she came to tell her life story.

My favorite moments in your book are the weird details, like when you apologize to producer Wharton Tiers for getting him fired, or mention that you loved the novel The Flamethrowers. How did you decide on what to include?

I didn’t want it to be like a conventional rock memoir. Not that I don’t like them, but I just wanted it to be something that felt... I was inspired by Joan Didion’s essays on California. I wanted it to reflect my life. And my life has not been straightforward. I’m a musician. I play in a rock band. I considered making a much less commercial or more arty book, but this was also a challenge: I’m approaching this mainstream, pop-culture genre.

A book book.

My first instinct was to make stuff up like Bob Dylan used to do. But he can get away with that because he’s much more mysterious than me.

The parts about family, your parents and your daughter, were to me the most powerful.

I certainly didn’t want to make it a Sonic Youth book. That was the last thing I wanted to do. I’m sure someone will make the definitive Sonic Youth book. I wanted it to be my story: a portrait of California, growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, and New York in the ’80s.

How did you decide to open the book with Sonic Youth’s last show?

Well, it’s very dramatic, and people are really interested in the breakup. I don’t want to sensationalize it, but at the same time it’s nice to give people a little bit of what they want right at the beginning. I like the idea of getting that over with and moving on.

You write about your art and lyrics being heavily influenced by what’s around you.

It’s weird the way improv lyrics sometimes come out, the way things come out that are surprising. It’s not always a literal association. I think that night [when Gordon performed in New York the same day as the grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer who killed Eric Garner] I said something like, "My heart bleeds for you." It was this line that came out of nowhere. You know, when you’re busy rushing around and you don’t really have time to process what’s going on in the world. But sometimes when you’re onstage, everything becomes distilled and suspended and relad, and you can let things come in.

After reading your book, I’m surprised to hear you use the word "relad" in relation to the stage.

It can be super tense, but I find the shows with my new band, Body/Head, to be incredibly calming. I just really get into a zone, and I know that my bandmate Bill is going to be right there. Sometimes it’s just super focused, and you can feel the audience’s concentration. That’s what it felt like that night.

For your art, you’ve recently re-started using the name Design Office, which you used before Sonic Youth. Why?

I use it as kind of an umbrella to pull in other things that I’ve been doing over the last ten years, in a Warholian way. It helps me get out of the mind of my individual ego, or that the people might be looking at me like, "Kim Gordon, the musician—she should be doing music." But mostly I look at it like an umbrella to put everything under that I do. If I was really together, I’d have somebody documenting all my photo shoots in some archival, Factory-like way.

That’s what Beyoncé does.

Oh, I wouldn’t say like that. Just as specimens of consumerism.

What would you do with that archive?

I don’t know, it’s just the idea of it. Eventually you make shows out of it. I meant it more as a conceptual approach to integrating different things that I do.

You write about going to see your own daughter play in her band. Does that feel like a part of your legacy?

She goes to art school. She doesn’t play music anymore. That was just a high school whim. She’s much more interested in painting. I think she’s really good. She has a strong voice in that world. That’s a gratifying legacy. But the idea of "legacy" is such a funny word.

Why?

It seems so important.

I think it is!

It’s great when you see your kid doing all these things that come from you in some way, but they do it in a way that they own. So you’re proud, because you feel like you actually didn’t have anything to do with it. It’s not like you’re badgering them to write a paper and they get an A on it. It’s something that has to do more with real life, making sense out of life by doing something that’s going to push them forward into the world.

Is writing a book about controlling your legacy?

I guess so. It is a very deliberate thing to do. I’m not running away from something; I’m doing something with a great deal of intent. When you start thinking back on your life—and I certainly did a lot of that when everything fell apart—it’s interesting to start thinking about your childhood. And then it’s like, well, what can I do with this experience? Make something constructive out of it.